Word: kleine
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Americans, William Klein is the least palpable of their great photographers, like one of the ectoplasmic figures in his own blurry street shots. Nowadays every history of photography gives his wild pictures of the early 1950s their due. But though born in New York City, Klein, 58, has lived in Paris since 1948, when he arrived packing the camera he won in a G.I. poker game. Living abroad made him less of a presence in the camera circles of his native country. So did the truculent novelty of his early work. Klein's debut volume of New York street photography...
...hardly helped matters that in 1965 he quit picture taking for nearly 15 years to make films, mostly documentaries. With Klein threatening to become the missing link of American photography, the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts has come to the rescue with a retrospective of his work, on view through April 5. There are tentative plans for it to travel to other cities, and it should, to spread the word again that Klein was crucial to the camera world's postwar taste for more offbeat and haphazard imagery; he helped set the mood from which photographers like Garry Winogrand...
...Klein came to photography by way of painting, having studied briefly with Fernand Leger. Once he turned to the camera, the former sociology major from New York's City College showed a deep instinct for the urban demotic, with its links to the police blotter, the tabloid and the B movie. With money earned by doing Vogue fashion spreads in France, he made a picture-taking trip to New York in 1954, equipped with both the expatriate's eye for its psychic stresses and the native's complicity in them. Without resorting to the bizarre, he got the profoundly unsettled...
...Klein worked with a locomotive verve and an indifference to the holy writ of camera technique. At a time when the nondistorting 50-mm lens (the kind that is still standard on most 35-mm cameras) was deemed the only fit instrument for recording truth, Klein used a wide angle to collect as much incident as possible within the frame. He favored a flash at long exposure, for its jittery harshness. He also went in for blurred images: smudged bodies in motion, heads so close to the lens that they dissolve into gaseous globes. The archetypal Klein photo is Minigang...
...Klein also took to plunging in among crowds to shoot point blank, so that faces meet the lens with mostly tentative expressions. As Manet had done a century earlier in his paintings, Klein recognized in the suspended gaze one of the chief signifiers of the modern temper. But judged by the canons of good photography, those pictures looked fumbled, invertebrate. Klein's anarchic strengths went unappreciated by eyes looking for nice tonal gradations and the standard ironies. Where were the compositional ligaments that held even the airiest Andre Kertesz photo in an iron fist? Where was the fine printing...